Wow, we created a community - now what?

Our online registration and event management software is a behind-the-scenes tool. Millions of people register for events and receive email invitations and confirmations without knowing what application did the grunt work - they only know the name of the event they want to attend.

Several months ago, I sat next to someone on the airplane and through casual conversation discovered that he was flying to an event sponsored by one of our customers, and yes, he had registered online through Certain Registration. He pulled out his printed confirmation page and I recognized our handiwork - I know this is small stuff for most, but for me it was a prideful moment nine years in the making.

Then I realized - wow, we make a product that affects people's lives slightly, a product that they don't know they are using, one that they take for granted and only care about when it doesn't work. It seems that I now work for a modern utility company.


Supporting the people behind the curtain

Professional meeting planners will understand that feeling. They do the work behind wonderful, educational, and entertaining events but often cannot share their attendees' enjoyment because they are mired in the daily slog of details required to bring hundreds or thousands of people together for a short time. We want our application to make the lives of these people a little bit easier every day.

As our user base has grown, we find ourselves associated with a group of people who depend on our application every day in order to do their job. Their ability to use the software and figure out how to achieve their immediate task will determine their productivity for that day - and thus their earning potential and how soon they can get home each evening. We try to make our application "easy-to-use", and when it isn't intuitive we have Help files, and when those don't answer the question we add solutions to our knowledge base. Still, sometimes you just want to talk to other people who have done the same thing that you are doing now.

"Web 2.0" - Social Networking and Communities

I was at ground zero of Web 1.0 (San Francisco 1994-99), but lately I'm feeling a bit old-fashioned. I put up a page on Myspace at my youngest sister's request, but I don't use it. Most of the people who want to be my "friends" are trying to sell me stuff I don't need or show me stuff I don't want to see. I also have a Facebook page but don't poke me and I promise not to waste your time there either. I don't care what music you are listening to today, but if you have set up an online registration form using SAML-based single-sign on standards then you have just become my BFF (best friend forever, or at least while I'm working on this project).

So the online community I want to be in consists of my co-workers and clients who actively use Certain Registration. We rarely meet in person, but we want to talk to and learn from each other, and we need to know how to do something new, what features are coming out next, and what bugs have been exposed / how they can be avoided / when they will be fixed.

Several of us at Certain have been looking at some online community applications to support these conversations, and my favorite by far is Community Server. Their application allows you to set up forums, blogs, and downloads for your registered users. The great thing about the application is its flexibility - you can put photos, files, and even Web videos into the "Downloads" area to make it a truly on-demand interactive training resource. Blogs can be used for quick announcements, release announcements, scheduled downtime, etc. in addition to articles (such as this one). Forums allow users to post questions and look for answers from anyone in the community (instead of relying solely on our help desk during its normal business hours).

I'm looking forward to having a tool like this to help bring together our global community. But please let me know if you have another community-based application that you like better.

Online Registration: Life as a small fish in a big ocean

Last week Lauren Covington and Stephen Nold at Meeting Tech Online (MTO) published "Registration Tools: What’s New, What’s Next", describing the results of their research into the subject. The topic raised by meeting planners that was of most interest to me was their desire to integrate registration systems with their other back-office systems.

Background: Big ocean, small fish

I'm not sure how big the meetings industry is. Starcite's Web site refers to the $300 billion global events industry, while a January 2007 PhoCusWright study projects "groups and meetings revenue" at $175 billion by 2008. Either way, the market size is really big, but according to the PhoCusWright study travel (air, hotel, car, ground transportation, cruise, travel) accounts for about 54% of the total while non-travel (meeting rooms, catering, audio/visual) accounts for 46%. Starcite's research predicts a $1.5 billion market size by 2010 for meetings technology tools (which I assume includes event RFPs, meeting expense management, meeting planning, online community, and registration applications). If online registration tools accounts for 10% of that total, then $150 million is a nice market niche for a small software company like ours, but this size makes it tough for us to set the technology direction of companies that organize events and spend 1,000 times that amount holding them.

(Comment: Thanks to Michael Boult, Starcite's CEO, for his polite comments correcting my originally reported data and providing additional information.)

Living with multiple systems when you are the smallest of the lot

The result is that we enter systems integration projects from a position of weakness. Companies look at their CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Intranet, and HR employee databases as their primary applications that are critical to business operation. While event management software is crucial to a small number of meeting planners, the rest of the organization spends maybe 15 minutes each year registering for a handful of events. As a software company, we want to build interfaces that others connect to, give them the documentation, and have them go at it. More often, we receive a stack of documentation and are asked how we are going to fit our round peg into their square hole.

Love it or hate it, everybody has it

The first place we started was with Microsoft. By integrating with Internet Explorer (Certain Registration), Outlook (email and calendar appointments), Excel (reports and imports), and Word (labels, badges, and printable documents) - we connect to the tools that 90% of our customers regularly use. The open source movement and competition from Google, IBM, and others have forced Microsoft to expand their products' interoperability slowly but steadily. I expect that Certain Registration and similar products will continue to grow closer to these standard tools in the future.

The key to communication is to speak the same language

Two systems that speak the same language can communicate readily. Two systems using different languages must have an "interpreter" in order to communicate. In software, the cost of building the interpreter can be the difference between winning and losing the business. Because online registration is dependent upon larger systems, we have to learn the languages of the core systems.

When I wrote the second version of Certain Registration (Register123.com) in 2001, I corrected the mistakes of the late 1990s, but I did not have a standard framework to build upon. Now, the software industry has both a standard communication method (Web Services) and language (XML). I've written previously about my efforts to help define a standard language for the events industry through the Convention Industry Council's APEX initiative. I have recently had the chance to review Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an established XML communication standard for "Single Sign On", which is the practice of logging in once and being authenticated into multiple applications. (I'll write more on that subject in a future post.)

Eating the elephant one bite at a time...

The reason I spend so much time on XML standards and Web Services is that, while we have integration interfaces now, the future for "minor" applications like registration will be to natively speak the common XML languages of the core applications. Then my clients' developers will be able to select Certain Registration as an off-the-shelf component of the much larger system that they are supporting, and they will be able to quickly exchange data within defined boundaries between our application and their other components.

As I see it now, this is going to be the only way for most organizations to have an "all-in-one" system that includes a professional meeting management component.

What to do when you can never have enough standard reports

One of the most common questions that I see on online registration RFPs is, "How many standard reports do you have?" It's a question that begs for a misleading answer, because there is no "standard" for reports in event registration and no two vendors' answers are comparable.

(Caveat: After thousands of industry discussions, the Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) has published a few report "standards" for specific areas of meeting planning, but few people use these without making at least minor adjustments for their specific business needs.)

Early on, we stopped trying to give customers a dozen or a hundred standard reports in Certain Registration and focused on providing a minimal set of reports "out of the box", while allowing users to copy and customize those reports in order to define their own standard reports. But even this hasn't been enough to meet our goal of "one-click reporting" for all customers.


Reporting in Excel With Online Data

Last year, I described my experience on-site at the National FFA Organization's 79th Annual Convention. The 80th Convention just ended, so last month it was time to update their on-site reports for this years' event. This process reminded me of some unique reporting that I did for FFA using Excel Web Queries.

While most business users are familiar with Excel spreadsheets, not too many people use its more advanced features such as Web Queries, Macros, and Pivot Tables. Web Queries allow you to pull data from any Web site address into an Excel spreadsheet. Pivot Tables allow you to take tabular data in a spreadsheet and summarize it by any column or row. And macros allow you to record a series of actions within the spreadsheet and then automate them in the future.

The FFA requires on-site reports beyond the capability of Certain Registration. In addition to pixel-specific formatting requirements, they have several "special rules", such as single-day registrants should count as one-half of a person when calculating the total registration numbers. In order to meet their needs, I started with an Excel spreadsheet, where I used a Web Query on one worksheet to extract raw data from the FFA event in Certain Registration.

I next added a worksheet that used a Pivot Table to summarize this raw data into a simple table.

Then, I used Excel formulas to apply "special rules" and to transfer the desired data to a pre-formatted worksheet suitable for printing.

And finally, I recorded an Excel macro and associated it with the FFA icon.

In the resulting Excel spreadsheet, when an FFA user who is logged into Certain Registration clicks on their logo on the first worksheet, the macro automatically runs the Web Query, refreshes the Pivot Tables, and updates the printable worksheet via its formulas. The user then clicks the print button and pulls the report off the printer.

Learn more

I'll leave it to the reader to decide if they are interested enough in this process to learn how to apply Web Queries, Pivot Tables, and Macros to their Excel spreadsheets. If so then Microsoft's help files and online resources provide ample instruction.

Will technology replace face-to-face meetings?

Jeff Rasco of Attendee Management Inc. pulled me aside at the MPI World Education Congress in Montreal last month with an interesting problem. He had a client who needed fax delivery of their online confirmations, which Certain Registration offers only via e-mail or printable documents. The situation behind this need led me to some interesting discoveries about the application of technology in the meetings industry.

"Virtual" Road Shows - in Person

Jeff had a client who manages events for a major pharmaceutical company. Instead of the typical practice of using a sales rep to pitch a product, the company wanted to arrange a nice steak dinner for doctors to sit down and listen to a world-class expert in their field discuss topics of mutual interest (some of which happened to be the company's products). But the cost of flying such expensive talent around the country to each major city would be high, and no expert is willing to use that much time meeting with a large number of small groups.

So Jeff's client contracted with 50 or so Morton's steak houses to use their new Velocity Suites product. One evening, doctors across the country come to the Boardroom at their local Morton's, are greeted by local representatives from Morton's and the pharmaceutical company, sit down for a nice dinner, and then at a specified time a large screen rolls out and the keynote address is broadcast into each dining room from the headquarters in New Jersey. The Boardrooms are set up for interactive presentations, so attendees can "raise their hand" and ask questions, which are heard at the other locations also.

To me, this is a perfect example of one way technology and "virtual meetings" are changing and will change the meetings industry. Humans are social, and fine food coupled with face-to-face contact with a personable sales rep simply works for businesses. But add to that mix a top-tier speaker in a small group setting, and you have a winning combination. This technology makes it possible to hire a speaker for 50 Boardrooms of 40 people each, when you could never afford the time or cost of meeting each group one at a time. And, done correctly, each small group will feel like they are getting the same attention as if there weren't 2000 others seeing the same program.

Since my conversation with Jeff, I've read more about this concept in the August 2007 issue of Successful Meetings ("Steakhouse Chain Makes High-Tech Meetings" by Vincent Alonzo, p. 11) and at Meeting Focus. I expect to see more restaurants offer this format and more companies use it in the near future.

New Meeting Formats, Same Registration Challenges

So back to the point of Jeff's conversation. His challenge was to manage registration for 50 or so small meetings, which together acted like one big meeting with a couple thousand attendees. Many doctors continue to prefer fax over email for their registration confirmations, so with past small meetings, Jeff's team would handle this request once or twice by simply printing out the email confirmation and then sending it via their fax machine. But the volume of fax requests for the Morton's meeting series was making this process cumbersome. He asked me if we could offer this capability, or if any online registration company does.

I thought about this problem on the flight home and wondered if maybe I could devise a feature for our application where he would enter an e-mail address that contained the registrant's fax number, and then our service would receive the e-mail, convert it into a fax, and deliver it to the appropriate number. I realized this solution could have broader application outside of meetings and briefly thought about starting an offshoot business, until I searched Google and found a dozen existing services. The one I liked best was Faxaway, where you send an email to [fax_number]@faxaway.com (e.g., 14153535335@faxaway.com), it faxes the content to the number provided, and then charges $0.11/minute to your account (based on the "From" email address that you used).

I'm not sure if Jeff used the service, but it was an example to me of the growing breadth of web-based services available to meeting professionals. Application designers don't always have to fit every solution into one system; sometimes it is better to figure out what you want technology to do and then look for it in a stand-alone system that can integrate with your current process.

History of Online Registration

MeetingTechOnline called to ask me questions for their upcoming "History of Online Registration" whitepaper. While I've told this story several times over the past 9 years, the framework of this interview made me think again about why certain technologies go from novel to standard practice in seemingly short bursts of time.

My History of Online Event Registration

Scott Curry, a friend from Clemson, started Enteronline.com in 1997 while I was in graduate school at Berkeley. His experience registering runners for marathons and 10Ks opened my eyes to the new technology of database-driven web sites and e-commerce, and led me to start Register123.com in 1998. Scott was moving to San Diego as Enteronline became a part of Active.com, and I wanted to apply the technology into a field that was more business-oriented than participatory sports. Offering online registration to professional event planners seemed like a good business model: a transaction-based fee structure, recurring revenue from the repeating nature of events, and substantial sums of money being spent in the existing industry.

In the end of 1998, Regweb had a working registration system, B-There was just starting up, Starcite was announced but not launched, Plansoft was selling mainly Windows applications, and SeeUThere was an eVite look-alike. Interestingly, all of these companies are now part of the new Starcite. At that time, most of us were competing against paper registration and in-house systems rather than each other. Cvent, Acteva, Regonline, and others were all right around the corner.

Right after we started, we tried to exhibit at the HSMAI Affordable Meetings show in San Jose. We couldn't get a booth, but we did land a demo with the show manager, George Little Management, who was looking for a vendor to replace their in-house system for the annual International Hotel, Motel & Restaurant Show. I'm proud to say that we've provided online registration to GLM and HSMAI ever since.

Why Then?

Advon asked why so many online registration companies started between 1997-1999. That time period was really a perfect storm for new technology development:

• Microsoft's Active Server Pages (.asp) and Allaire's ColdFusion (now an Adobe product) changed the World Wide Web by allowing developers to (relatively) easily create web sites and forms that could interact with databases. Thus we could collect registration data online, store it in a database, and then deliver it to meeting planners as reports on demand.
• More people began to use email and Netscape in their daily life. These attendees asked for event web sites, online registration, and instant email confirmations.
• Cybercash (now a part of PayPal) and other processors made it easy for developers to integrate online credit card processing into registration forms, without investing in direct connections with the credit card payment network. Now payment for event fees could be collected and confirmed prior to delivering an email confirmation, thus greatly improving events' cash flow and collections.

The result was a situation where people wanted it, technology could deliver it, and the cost to deliver the service was less than the clear benefits. Throw in a few hundred million dollars' worth of venture capital money chasing anything ".com" and you had dozens of start-ups entering the market for online event registration.

Overcoming Early Hurdles

Of course it wasn't that easy, or we wouldn't have seen all of mergers and bankruptcies in this market since 2001. Trust was one of the biggest hurdles I experienced in the early days, as we tried to tell people that we would hold their data for them, but deliver it to them at any time when they needed it.

Back then, the mindset in IT was that security revolved around a physical location - your data was secure when it was stored on your computers, which were safely locked in your office. The idea that someone else should hold your data on their computers was like early banks trying to get people to take the money out of their safes and put it into an "account", which had only a small percentage of cash reserves behind it. Every time I thought we had moved past the trust issue, someone like Event411.com would close shop in the middle of their customers' events and strand both their money and data in bankruptcy court.

From 1997 to 2007 the trust issue has declined in importance because (1) customers have had ten years of experience with web-based services such as travel reservations, online banking, eBay, and Amazon to get comfortable with the web hosted model, and (2) suppliers like Certain Software have provided service to event planners for over 10 years without stranding their customers.

What have you done for me lately?

Before 2001, the emphasis for meeting technology seemed to be, "What can you do for the attendee?" Thus our business was geared toward providing event web sites with a custom look-and-feel, posting FAQs online instead of answering questions one call at a time, linking to online registration forms with integrated credit card processing, and delivering e-mail confirmations and invitations.

After 2003 the question from most event planners is, "What can you do for me?" They take for granted attendee-facing technology and now focus on back-office processes, security, reliability, and full-functionality (i.e., one system that fits all needs). Thus meeting technology is moving towards integrated registration, housing, travel, program management, budgeting, meetings approval, and RFPs.

What happened between 2001 and 2003 was that 9/11 crushed the travel industry and many event people were let go while budgets for new hires were frozen. Since the group travel business recovered in 2003, work loads have increased while human resources have stayed the same. Online registration products matured to the point that they are expected to take care of attendees, so meeting planners focus on back-office efficiency and productivity.

The effect on registration budgets and full-service vendors

The past decade of work has naturally effected service providers who were in the meetings industry before the Internet technology existed. In many companies, registration technology budgets are going down as organizations strive to replace multiple separate systems (membership management, on-site registration, call center technology, online registration, meeting planning software, etc.) with an integrated system. While they are willing to pay more for the integrated system than they did for any one older system, they expect its cost to be less than the sum of the legacy systems.

Also, full-service event registration companies continue to thrive. There will always be a market for whom a single contact is more important than a single system. These people will pay more to a full service provider who delivers an integrated service that hides the complexity of multiple systems and processes. Our business at Certain sees this in the relationship between some of our customers and resellers. We have customers with their own product license who do everything themselves, while other companies contract with a reseller who has a license with us and provides service on top of our application. But a third and growing group of customers follow a hybrid model, where they have a license with us and manage some events themselves, but also contract with a full-service provider/reseller for other events where the reseller uses their clients' license with us.